AUSTRALIA AUTHOR · FICTION
John Harwood
John Harwood (born 1946) was born in Hobart, Tasmania and is an Australian poet, literary critic and novelist. Source: John Harwood on Wikipedia.
Most acclaimed
The Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E.I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life. --From publisher description.
Eliot to Derrida
1995
Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the specialist interpreter, from I. A. Richards and the Cambridge School to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the vast industries which have grown up around 'modernism' and 'postmodernism'. Tracing the reception of T. S. Eliot's poems - notably The Waste Land - from the earliest reviews to the post-war era of mass-produced interpretations, it shows how the insights of Eliot's first readers were lost in a fog of reverent explication. Just as 'Mr. Eliot' was co-opted by Richards, Leavis and the New Critics to serve as their patron saint, so Derrida - perhaps the last person Eliot would have chosen as his successor - became the principal guru of the new theoretical dispensation. And just as the quest for the One True Meaning collapsed under the weight of its inherent contradictions, so the quest for the One True Theory was destined to end in factional brawling between rival personality cults. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an exhilarating book.